Go into Fritz Lang’s
House by the River knowing it’s a tale of murder (well, manslaughter) most foul and the moment you see the bloated carcass of an animal making its daily appearance drifting by aforementioned domicile you know that’s not going to be the only thing that floats by to discomfort the occupants. And sure enough we’re barely a reel into the picture when Louis Hayward’s bemused failed author, who the film is at pains to show literally wouldn’t harm a fly, has accidentally strangled the new maid after his flirting goes wrong and he tries to stop her screaming from attracting the neighbour’s attention. Cue panic and begging entreaties to his brother Lee Bowman to help him hide the body – after which things take a slightly more unexpected turn as Hayward starts to enjoy and exploit the publicity her disappearance excites, blackening her reputation as he gets his name in the papers and his books start selling while things gradually take a turn for the worse for his brother, whose guilt over his part in sending the body to its not so final watery grave makes him the perfect suspect when it turns out the wood sack that served as her shroud had his name stencilled on it…
It’s a film that didn’t get much love from critics back in 1950 and is often dismissed as a minor work when Lang is discussed – even Lang rarely spoke of it after it flopped and disappeared from circulation – but it’s certainly one of the best of his late American films, in Hayward offering him the kind of twisted pathology that harks back more directly to
M than his Hollywood noirs: Hayward has the right mixture of meekness, slightly sickly charm and seedy menace that made him the best of the screen Saints in his one outing as Leslie Charteris’ vigilante thief in
The Saint in New York 12 years earlier. Looking like Orson Welles svelter younger brother and sounding like George Macready, he may not have meant to kill, but his manic-depressive self-satisfied enjoyment of the unintended positive consequences, the celebrity they bring him feeding his ego and the jolts of panic when he’s confronted with events he can’t control are convincingly vivid. It’s also a fairly elaborate production for a Republic picture too, with Lang showing a bit more style than some of his other Fifties films. The ending, with its literal manifestation of guilt open to a supernatural interpretation that feels out of place here, isn’t entirely successful and leaves open the question of just what kind of future its survivors can expect, but it’s not enough to undermine what has gone before in a film well worth rediscovery.
With the negative long missing, the picture quality on Kino’s Region A-locked Bluray, taken from a 2018 restoration by Lobster Films, is better than the reportedly terrible Public Domain copies that have been floating around on VHS, DVD and streaming, but it’s still more a good enough transfer than a great one, a few moments showing contrast issues in part of the frame and the image displaying decent but not outstanding detail elsewhere. Extras are an audio commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and an interview with Pierre Rissient taken from Kino’s DVD release of an earlier restoration he and Claude Chabrol were involved in as well as a trailer for Lang’s
Woman in the Window (which, unlike the one on Kino’s Blu of the film which uses the first two minutes of the feature’s soundtrack, includes the proper trailer soundtrack here).
Although often marketed as a film noir, an impression reinforced by the casting of genre stalwarts Dennis O’Keefe (who pseudonymously co-wrote) and William Bendix, 1949’s
Cover Up is more of a small town thriller with appropriately small town pacing instead of the escalating fatalism of its big city cousins. Dialogue is laid-back rather than snappy, the suspects nice, ordinary polite folk with decent jobs – the chief one among them a bank manager in the days when they were regarded as pillars of the community rather than the spawn of Satan - and Barbara Britton is more girl next door than femme fatale. In many ways it feels more like an MGM Thirties detective movie with a less glamorous and witty star.
Set at Christmas (no snow but plenty of trees and decorations), its less than convincing premise sees O’Keefe’s insurance investigator unusually being pressed by his employer to prove a death was murder rather than suicide even though it means triggering a double indemnity payment of $20,000 because it will be great publicity (and, who knows, maybe the beneficiary will be guilty and they won’t have to pay). Even when he brushes up against Bendix’s unco-operative sheriff, the latter parries his attempts to inject some urgency into the investigation by dictating the leisurely pace: like everyone else in the town, he doesn’t want any ripples or complications to disrupt the town’s quiet routine. Along with a lack of urgency there’s a lack of threat or real danger for most of the running time: even Britton’s attempts to remove what may or may not be evidence incriminating her father doesn’t evoke that vice-like grip of futile desperation noirs aspire to in their final act. The result is watchable but far from compelling and all in all rather forgettable.
The Bluray transfer on Kino’s Region A-locked Bluray is curious, prone in some of its darker scenes to the kind of contrast problems you traditionally see with dupes and third generation copies but with the kind of detail that usually comes from a negative: it’s never bleached out or loses detail, but it does noticeably flatten the image a bit at times. No extras at all, not even trailers for other releases.
Eric Valette’s
The Prey has nearly all of the clichés of the man-on-the-run genre, but does them so well you probably won’t care even as you’re ticking off the list: the escaped convict on a mission with the whole world against him who can still run a marathon in record time after falling off a bridge or being shot (Albert Dupontel), the tough-but-beautiful female cop on his trail (Alice Taglioni), the disgraced ex-cop who can’t let his last case go (Sergi Lopez) and the respectable villain who everybody trusts. A gallic version of The Fugitive, it has a convincingly creepy villain in Stéphane Debac’s very ordinary cellmate whose life Dupontel saves in prison and who repays the favour by killing his wife, stealing his loot and kidnapping his child as a present for his wife and accomplice, leading our anti-hero to go over the wall to track him down only to find he’s being framed for Debac’s child murders and that the cops and one of the victims’ father aren’t too eager to bring him in alive.
Dupontel, whose career alternates between playing hard cases and directing and starring in anarchic comedies, is one of the most graceless runners you’ll ever see, his arms flailing about like a windmill so much he reminds you of a drowning man or Paul Michael Galser in the title sequence of
Starsky and Hutch. But there probably hasn’t been a French leading man to visibly do so many of his own dangerous stunts since Jean-Paul Belmondo in his 70s heyday. He’s not a whitewashed protagonist either – when we meet him in prison he isn’t the usual innocent man sent down for a crime he didn’t commit but a professional criminal with all the cunning and ruthlessness that implies. The plot may be basic but it doesn’t always deliver the cliché you expect and puts a spin on some of those you do. Valette directs with considerable panache and visual imagination that makes the most of his well chosen locations and gives the picture a real sense of scale. What’s more he knows how to really showcase a good stunt and keep things moving without turning them into an incomprehensible mess – no shakeycam or MTV editing to hide shortcomings and give the illusion of energy here, just the kind of excellent craftsmanship you used to be able to take for granted in big budget action films before Michael Bay and Paul Greengrass shook things up for the worse. It could probably do without the epilogue but it’s a small price to pay for such a surprisingly invigorating thriller.
Universal had a habit of turning their busted pilots or more expensive TV movies and mini-series into theatrical features outside the USA, sometimes with minor additions of nudity (absent here) or profanity (a couple of minor instances), often as supporting features:
Newman's Law is one that skipped the small screen and went to US cinemas as well without making any more of an impression than it would on TV. It’s a determinedly adequate film where no-one’s slumming but no-one’s putting themselves out, with George Peppard the incorruptible cop who never got promoted because he gets too involved getting framed when a drug case goes south and naturally taking things into his own hands to you know the rest. Although it tries to be gritty it can’t escape its by the numbers small screen ambitions and even though the deported gangster behind it has an interesting (albeit legally questionable) motive by the time the action kicks in in the last 20 minutes with a decent shootout in a going out of business supermarket I’d sort of lost interest. Not terrible, just average, though it’s amazing that a certain reviewer gave Kino's Region A-locked Blu 4.25/5 for picture quality when it’s basically an acceptable DVD level presentation that obviously looks at least a couple of steps removed from the negative.
There are certain kinds of movies that should only be viewed whilst consuming beer and peanuts, the kind of movies where, say, a black martial arts instructor’s cocaine dealing best friend inadvertently releases an ancient Chinese demon into the subways of 70s New York where it mutilates commuters while a gang war between the Red Dragons and the (I kid you not) Black Spades rages on the streets above until War Hawk Tanzania has no choice but to don his gold dungarees of death and take a trip to the subway to kick some demon ass. Unfortunately there just ain’t enough beer or peanuts to make 1976’s
Devil’s Express aka
Gang Wars aka
Phantom of the Subway aka
Death Express even one tenth of the so bad that it’s good guilty pleasure it sounds like it should be. It’s sloppy stuff that never commits to its own insanity or comes up with the action, with a particularly messy script by five writers – four of whom have no other writing credits, one a grip on the crew – that offers three different plot strands that never really connect while its splendidly named leading man is sidelined for so much of the film that you could take out and pay off a mortgage while waiting for him to fight, and not in a Bruce Lee promising his mum not to unleash his fists of fury until they push him too far in the last half hour of the movie kind of way but in the he’s barely in the movie kind of way instead.
Technically it’s a mixed bag, benefiting from a capable cinematographer in Paul Glickman, who had worked his way up from porn films to working with Henry Jaglom (
Tracks, Sitting Ducks) and Larry Cohen (
The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, God Told Me To, Perfect Strangers, Special Effects, The Stuff) and even persuaded his mum, Sarah Nyrick, to give the film’s best performance as a bag lady. On the debit side they clearly weren’t so lucky with their sound recordist since a few scenes feature people obviously talking but not actually making any sound, something the score only sporadically attempts to hide, while it features possibly the worst old age make up in screen history that makes the priest who explains the plot in the last ten minutes look like a less convincing version of the Peking Homunculus in
Doctor Who story
The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
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Frank Ruiz’s fight choreography isn’t exactly imaginative, co-writer-director Barry Rosen is of the point the camera in the general direction school of the few action scenes and with the cast not putting any visible force behind their kicks and punches the editing and composition do nothing to make them look better. Gore hounds won’t find much to get their teeth into with the subterranean slayings either. It’s certainly not a case of the lack of funds being compensated by inspiration in any department.
The cast don’t exactly distinguish themselves either, with the film’s best actor, Aki Aleong, giving the worst performance as a possessed Chinese businessman who stumbles through the streets and subways with bug eyes painted on his eyelids
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(it was his first acting gig after an eight year gap, so maybe he was rusty) while Tanzania’s sidekick Wilfredo Roldan sports a look that’s a cross between an average height Peter Dinklage and Edward James Olmos in
Blade Runner and which makes a bigger impression than his acting abilities. As for War Hawk Tanzania himself, despite having one of the coolest names in the history of grindhouse exploitation moviemaking but looking like a cross between a Jim Kelly non-singing telegram and Ron Glass/Detective Harris in
Barney Miller, he’s neither embarrassment or asset, lacking the charisma to carry a bad movie but just competent enough not to make it seem worse when reciting his lines from the by then well-thumbed and falling apart at the seams used paperback copy of the Blaxploitation Attitude by Numbers Handbook.
While this is exactly the kind of crazed pitch that a bad review only makes people want to watch it anyway, be warned that unintentional laughs are pretty much limited to the OTT blood spray in one killing at the 50-minute mark while most of it plays like the kind of film the Victoria Biograph would have booked because they needed something, anything to fill the screen for an hour and a half when the lights were dimmed and their regular patrons who never watched the movies were otherwise engaged. It possibly could have made a fun seven-and-a-half minute cutdown in the Super 8mm home movie days, but uncut it’s the kind of film that’s just going through the motions. Still, if you see only two War Hawk Tanzania films, this will be one of them…
Code Red’s region-free Blu-ray offers a healthy looking transfer taken from the original negative – there’s one minor tramline scratch during a shot of Brother Theodore doing his
“and I’m not feeling so hot myself” routine to a crowd – with only a thirty second trailer for the film and trailers for other 70s grindhouse movies, so if you’re wondering why the Riverdale Grooming and Boarding Pet Center gets an end credits thank you, with no commentary or interviews that will just have to remain one of life’s great mysteries.
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